BLAMING THE LEFT FOR ISRAEL’S WOES IS A FLIGHT FROM REALITY

HaAretz is hands down the best commercial media outlet in the State of Israel. It has a handful of top notch reporters that often offer a liberal or left perspective to what is happening here.

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However, at times they stray from the reality of the situations and offer opinions that are not quite rational. My readers should know by now that I have never been a supporter of the One State Solution for Israel/Palestine, but blaming the left As Akiva Eldar does in the following is far from the truth. The left is not to blame for Israel’s woes, to think so is a flight from reality. But, despite my disagreements with his viewpoint, especially the heading of his post, it does offer some food for thought in support of the Two State Solution. That, in my opinion is the ONLY solution.

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The desperate leftists propose joining together two hostile communities with a bloodly feud between them and endless prejudices about each other. For 64 years the Jewish community realized the Zionist vision using discriminatory immigration and residential laws, unequal division of resources and hegemony over religious and national symbols. For 45 years a Jewish minority has deprived the Palestinian collective in the occupied territories of political rights and violated the dignity, property rights and freedom of movement of millions of human beings.

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One State with a wall between??

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The defeatism of the left

A binational state is not a solution, but rather a flight from reality and a recipe for perpetuating a duel between two nations. Anyone who gives up on a peace agreement between two states is gambling with the fate of the State of Israel.

By Akiva Eldar

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The settlers are right. Had today’s Zionist left been leading the Jewish community here in the 1940s there is a good chance we never would have had a state. Had those who lay proud claim to being “the peace camp,” who explain how “it’s impossible to evict 300,000 settlers,” been running the show in the early ‘50s, the Yishuv − with its population of 600,000 − would never have taken in one million Jews. The word “irreversible” does not exist in the vocabulary of the settlers. They did not say that the Oslo Accords spelled the death knoll of their enterprise. The settlers adhere to their faith all the way to another outpost and another coalition government, and the left cries all the way to nowhere.

While the settlers build house after house and destroy the peace process stage after stage, the honorable members of the Zionist left announce one after another the capitulation to “the will of the people.” In exchange for the idea of partition, they propose, accompanied by heartrending sighs, that we begin to prepare for a binational state. It’s like a marriage counselor who advises a couple that has been making each other miserable for decades to go on living together in order to avoid divvying up their assets. Instead of helping them to separate amicably, co-parent successfully and build independent new lives, the counselor urges them to perpetuate their misery.

The desperate leftists propose joining together two hostile communities with a bloodly feud between them and endless prejudices about each other. For 64 years the Jewish community realized the Zionist vision using discriminatory immigration and residential laws, unequal division of resources and hegemony over religious and national symbols. For 45 years a Jewish minority has deprived the Palestinian collective in the occupied territories of political rights and violated the dignity, property rights and freedom of movement of millions of human beings.

What will happen when the Palestinian minority in the binational state becomes the majority − in 2020, or 2030, or perhaps in 2050? What will we do then, when the Palestinian majority exercises its right to vote? The model for action already exists: The Palestinian parliament can copy the behavior of Israel’s Knesset in the Netanyahu-Lieberman-Eldad era.

Is anyone willing to guarantee that the Palestinians won’t replace Israel’s Law of Return, for Jewish immigrants, with a law enshrining the Palestinian right of return? Can anyone guarantee that they won’t turn the Jewish National Fund into the Palestinian National Fund; replace the blue and white flag with a black, white and green flag with a crescent moon on the side, and replace “Hatikva” with “Fida’i” ‏(popularly known as “Biladi, Biladi”‏)? Who will light the torches on Mount Herzl on Independence Day? Or perhaps the government of Israstine will ban ceremonies marking the Jews’ temporary victory.

Why wouldn’t they give funding preference for schools in Arab local councils, rename the Israstine international airport after Yasser Arafat and change the name of Ariel University Center of Samaria to the Arab University of the West Bank? We’ve been riding them for decades, why wouldn’t they want to turn the tables on us? At best we’d come out of it with only a few broken ribs.

True, Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin has said he would rather live in a binational state than to divide Jerusalem. So what? Is he genuinely willing to cede his place on the dais to Knesset Speaker Ahmed Tibi and settle for interjections from the Jewish opposition parties’ back benches? True, “United Jerusalem” will not turn into “United Al Quds” during his term; that irresponsible mortgage, taken out by him and his friends on the new Zionist left, will be paid by all of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A binational state is not a solution, but rather a flight from reality and a recipe for perpetuating a duel between two nations. Anyone who gives up on a peace agreement between two states is gambling with the fate of the State of Israel. Leftist, go to the settlers, learn their ways and settle at the doorstep of every Israeli voter. It’s not too late.

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1 Comment

The two state solution is dead and has been dead for a while. It is neither two states, nor a solution. Those who support this mirage are unwittingly helping entrench the current apartheid structure and giving it legitimization as a “temporary situation” while the ever growing settlements and Jewish population beyond the green line are making sure that the “temporary” situation cannot be reversed.

In practice, there is already a one state, with different classes and rights based on a person’s ethnic/religious origin – the classic definition of apartheid. And apartheid is abolished just like slavery – by granting equal rights for all.

By the way, the one state with equal rights does not mean that a partition will not be possible in the future (although I truly doubt that such thing could happen). But the first thing that should be done is to grant equal rights to Palestinians living under Israeli rule. After that, if they two “nationalities” decide to partition the country, they should do it in negotiations as equals, not as negotiations between a warden and his prisoner, which is the current format of the “peace talks”.